The Original Garage Doors

This is the room that Ted is slowly morphing into his office, circa last fall, just before we closed. Um, so far all we've done is take down the groovy bit of fabric hanging over the window and the crappy insulation from the pipes and clean out a garbage bag's worth of dust and all the junk left behind by the POs. But I did promise Ted I would post a before photo so we could chronicle all the progress, as we'll be taking on some more serious work next week when we remove the ceiling boards.

And that pale green stage or platform or whatever it is in the center of the room? Turns out those are our original garage doors, or at least part of them, constructed of tongue-and-groove boards. Very cool.

There aren't very many of these obscenely heavy wooden garage doors left in Evanston. Our inspector said he only came across two or three similar ones in the last twenty years of home inspection. Er, one of those was for a house he inspected for us, an inspection that turned out to be a train wreck because--among other disasters--the garage didn't have a proper roof! That tarp is sitting on bare boards; we have no idea why it didn't have a real covering--and no, you really, really couldn't tell from the ground it didn't have a real roof, only when we got up there did we know for sure. (But it did still have the original chimney, which was somehow used to heat the old Model T Fords in winter, so that's something.) This is the house we fired our first agent over. Here are the pics of that garage, inside and out (the doors slid from side to side, rather than up):

We tried out the forearm forklifts to carry our doors out of Ted's office and back to the garage, but they are so unbelievably heavy, that when we got to the stairs I couldn't lift them high enough. They're sitting in the laundry room, waiting for my much-taller cousins to help Ted get them out of the basement.

The boards are in great shape, and we will probably disassemble the doors to salvage the boards for repair projects. Here's the unpainted side of one of them...


All right, I know that doesn't show them off very well. If I think about it, I'll try to get a replacement picture.